Building Symbols for NDK project takes too long in Android Studio

Question

I am working on an Android Project which makes use of the NDK and binds the rather large Boost C++ library. Upon every startup of Android Studio, the IDE takes a rather long time of about 1 hour (more or less, on an i7 quad-core machine) during the Building Symbols stage, during which it is effectively impossible to use the IDE. I guess the bottleneck is directly related to the huge number of symbols included in Boost.

Is there a known remedy to this problem? I have not seen many complaints about this problem, but this forum post seems to ask for help for the same issue: https://forum.xda-developers.com/tools/android-studio/android-studio-2-2-add-cpp-files-using-t3499634

Answer 1

I am facing the exact same issue - after upgrading my Android Studio installation to 2.3.3 yesterday, opening my project now faces me with at least 30 mins of "building symbols" at which point the IDE is effectively useless.

I can build the project via gradle commands in terminal, so I have no idea why this step is mandatory in AS.

I read that this may have something to do with using the NDK build (Android.mk?) vs. CMake (CMakeLists.txt), but I have not yet been able to convert over my .mk file to test this out. This is a legacy project, and the NDK portion is still somewhat of a mystery to me :(